Ars System Guide: March 2011 Edition

The latest installment of the Ars Technica System Guide brings Intel's new …

Some days we love the PC; other days we curse it. The past two or three years, though, seem to have been full of more love than hate, thanks to several major innovations hitting the PC market. Solid state disks (SSDs), several GPU updates from minor to major, and significant updates in the CPU market have left us smiling. Monitors have also seen updates, although changes there have been somewhat more mixed—nicer IPS (in-plane switching) monitors have become slowly more numerous again, but we've lost vertical height in the most common monitor sizes as aspect ratios have shifted.

The gory details aside, computers today are what we say about almost every update—the System Guide gets faster and cheaper, and we get more and more happy with the performance.

System Guide Basics

The main three-box System Guide is back in this installment, with the traditional Budget Box, Hot Rod, and God Box addressing three different price points in the market. The main System Guide's boxes are general-purpose systems with a strong gaming focus, which means you won't find any office boxes or bargain-basement machines here.

The low end of the scale, the Budget Box, is still a formidable gaming machine despite its reasonable price tag ($600-$800). The Hot Rod represents what we think is a reasonable higher-end general-purpose computer that packs plenty of gaming performance, although we've adjusted the price tag a few times recently, from $1400-1600 down to $1200-1400, and now, perhaps back up to the old point to reflect new capabilities and jumps in performance. The God Box remains closest to unchanged from previous incarnations, a very capable starting point for a high-end workstation. It may not do exactly what you want, but it should be an excellent starting point for anyone with a good idea of their truly high-end computing needs, be it gaming to excess after winning the lottery, taking advantage of GPU computing, or storing and editing tons of HD video.

The short take would be: the Budget Box is for those who are seeking the most bang for their buck. The Hot Rod is for enthusiasts with a larger budget but who still know that there's a sweet spot between performance and price. The God Box is for someone who needs the ultimate in performance, but who doesn't want to just waste money for the sake of wasting it (as we often say in these guides, "God wouldn't be a glutton.")

Each box is set up with a full roster of recommendations, down to mouse, keyboard, and speakers. As these are general-purpose boxes, we skip things like game controllers and $100 gaming mice, although the God Box does get something a little nicer. We also discuss alternative configurations and upgrades; today's guide reflects AMD's dominance in the video card market, the battle between Intel and AMD in the sub-$200 CPU space, and the appearance of affordable SSDs—at least if you have a decently sized budget.

As a side note, we do address other systems in our occasional Specialty System Guides. Green computing, more gaming-focused setups at slightly different price points, home theater PCs, an even a lower-cost office/"mom" box known as the Ultimate Budget Box, and others. If you don't see anything that interests you here, please feel free to check them out.

Sandy Bridge, Cayman, and new bits

This update of the System Guide brings big changes in some areas, and relatively few changes in others.

In processors, Intel's new Core i3/i5/i7 processors, formerly code-named "Sandy Bridge," find their way into the Hot Rod. They don't quite get into Budget Box pricing territory yet, and Sandy Bridge-based Xeons (for the God Box) are not scheduled to make an appearance until the end of the year.

Video cards are shaken up all-around by numerous new releases from NVIDIA and AMD. AMD's Cayman chips in their highest-end Radeon 6900-series cards continue a string of strong performers from AMD, but NVIDIA's GF110 and derivatives give AMD surprisingly good competition in the Geforce GTX 500-series cards.

SSDs are a little more ambiguous. The latest and greatest Sandforce SF-2200/SF-2500 controllers have yet to hit the market, the Crucial RealSSD C400 (Marvell-based) is also yet to arrive, and Intel's G3 controller is even further in the distance. Yet, some changes are still occurring, with Intel's Marvell-based 510-series SSDs being a surprise for many.

Other changes are less significant, but 2011 has started off as an interesting year and it looks like it will remain so for the System Guide.

166 Reader Comments

The only surprise is that the transition to 64 bits seems to be much slower than the transition from 16 bits to 32 bits. I wonder if the reason is that 32 bit applications have maxed out the thirst for power for most people.

This guide must have come in right under the wire for the new 6Gb/s SSDs that are hitting the market (Intel 510, SF 2x00). Those seem like prime candidates for the Hot Rod box, even if it is about $80 more expensive, the Intel 510 120GB 6Gbps outperforms the Force 120 drive by significant amount. If you've got the 6Gbps ports available, use 'em!

You guys really ought to re-evaluate cases. I love Antec, I have a Three Hundred, but I've been looking at some friends' cases and honestly...I think Antec is coasting. The cable management on this thing is garbage, and any competent case should have a cutout on the backplane for CPU heatsink mounting (and many in the same price range do).

Also, if you're going for the God Box I'd say an Astro A40 Audio System is a must. Or, at the very least, the Mixamp (I argue that, while overpriced, there really isn't a better headset out there than the A40...headphones, yes, but not headset). The Xonar D2 already does Dolby Headphone, but the Mixamp gives you a classy on-desktop volume control, plus if you're using Ventrilo (or if your game supports separate game audio and voice chat devices) you get another knob to easily balance game/voice levels on-the-fly.

I'd almost push something like that down into the Hot Rod build...at the mid-high end, I find many people still cheap out on the sound. They'll spend $300 on a video card, $300 on a monitor, then hem and haw over whether to spend $70 on a sound card (or $250 on a headset).

First of all, great guide! I love to see what other builds people are dreaming up. This in concert with the recent TonyMacx86 guides cover every computer scenario I could see putting together.

I used a Lian Li PC-A05NA case recently for a computer. Not only does it look/function great, but its the smallest full size ATX case I could find. I'd recommend it for any build as long as the video card fits.

As for the SSD's, I have a Crucial C300 and a OCZ Vertex LE in a couple different computers and they are instantly fast. Besides size/cost improvement, I just can't imagine how the new generation of SSD controllers are going to improve these things. More reliable? Longer life?

"The FASTRA II design contains six NVIDIA GTX295 dual-GPU cards, and one GTX275 single-GPU card. To fit all this hardware in a single PC case, a special cage was designed for the graphics cards, which are connected to the motherboard by flexible riser cables. To satisfy all 13 GPUs, The system has four power supplies. At full speed, it can outperform a moderately sized cluster of state-of-the-art CPUs. And guess what… this system costs less than 6000 euros!"

There's a lot of compromise on the godbox build in order to fit two aging xeon's.

I'm no expert, but doesn't the lack of 16x pci-e electrical give problems for the speedy graphics cards? And you have to choose between a firewire plugin card and usb 3.0?

Ok, many of those components are very impressive, and 48 gigs of ram? who wouldn't want that for messing around with a ramdrive.

But in many situations, wouldn't you rather have a newer mainboard with 16x electrical, and wouldn't you want to run 2ghz+ ram?

In a system in this price range, it also seems you'd want hifi components for the audio rather than a logitech solution. Yes, there are websites and forums that can help you with that, but that's also the case with every other bit of kit in that box. A proper (ordinary) surround setup run off of an asus hdav slim or maybe even an amd 6970 would only be about 1000$ on top, and a good setup would be a mere 2000$. Dali ikon 2.0 with an NAD surround receiver would be befitting. And hey, it'd actually run blueray, which the godbox doesn't =P

And you go with only a single screen?

It seems like the godbox is designed for someone who only cares about the number of flops available from the main processor, and the rest is thrown together halfhazzardly out of some idea that expensive components are good. How about actually researching what people who are into each segment want, why they want it, and then have them help build the godbox feature list? I'll bet you, you'd arrive at a completely different machine.

The only surprise is that the transition to 64 bits seems to be much slower than the transition from 16 bits to 32 bits. I wonder if the reason is that 32 bit applications have maxed out the thirst for power for most people.

Usually it's not necessary to have the ability to allocate more then 4GB per web browser process. Or 2GB if your using Windows, I suppose.

I am surprised 1333 RAM is recommended for all builds. I believe 1600 MHz is only slightly more expensive and gives a boost of 10-15% in many scenarios.

Well for AMD the 1600 speed is actually a overclock and may or may not work due to a number of variables, some of which is only under your control.

Also 10-15% seems to me to be heavily over optimistic. You may be able to get that performance in some sort of synthetic benchmark that is only barely relevant to real world usage. I don't know for certain and it really does not matter. Those speeds may or may not work.

I own 1600 RAM and I just run it at 1333. The reason for this is because I believe that often times the 1333 and 1600 speeds are actually using the same RAM chips and the quality of a particular batch of chips determines what their ratings are. That is the cheap 1333 is probably marginal. Any perceived improvements in performance pales in comparison to long levity and stability in my personal machines.

The only surprise is that the transition to 64 bits seems to be much slower than the transition from 16 bits to 32 bits. I wonder if the reason is that 32 bit applications have maxed out the thirst for power for most people.

Actually, yes.

With 32-bit, the wizardry required to have RAM > 1MiB dried out. For most people, 2 GiB of RAM per process is Good Enough™.

At the top end, different primary uses demand differing specialised solutions. In the future, perhaps we could have for example an HPC God Box, a video editing God Box, a rendering God Box?

Those willing to spend $10k on a computer probably already have a fairly good idea of what hardware might fill their needs. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see how the different compromises pan out. Personally, for example, if I were looking for an HPC workstation for my own research, I wouldn't need an expensive RAID array, or even a high-end consumer video card. But 24 cores would be a boon, as might a Tesla C2050.

Another desirable aspect of any machine is low-noise operation — these aren't sitting in a data centre somewhere! It would be good to see this addressed in a God Box, or possibly even the Hot Rod.

While I think this is a very good guide, I would like to suggest that you make a Intel and a AMD guide. As a user who prefers AMD, I would really like to see the Hot Rod and God box that was built around a AMD processor as well. By making a guide that covers both you address the interests for both Intel users and AMD users.

While I think this is a very good guide, I would like to suggest that you make a Intel and a AMD guide. As a user who prefers AMD, I would really like to see the Hot Rod and God box that was built around a AMD processor as well. By making a guide that covers both you address the interests for both Intel users and AMD users.

I'm running a 1090T myself, and very happy with it for what I paid. But there's a very good reason you don't see AMD in anything other than budget systems right now- they have nothing comparable to Intel's top-shelf stuff. Not even close.

Your be mad to buy those xeons now with new ones not far around the corner.

I bought an X5650 in september last year with that same dual super micro board, but just running it single cpu at the mo, because can't bring myself to spend another huge whack on these cpu's. Might add another one in a years time second hand when they are a bit less.

It's a great piece of kit of course, but you can get the same performance with an overclocked SB and sometimes better perofrmance

To me, that God box is an excellent computer, but has no balance whatsoever - > Balance of course is not the point of the god box, but I'd rather see 13,000 USD well spent rather than THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS

My only complain with the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB is its loud. Perhaps even, very loud. That's a price to pay for the one 1TB drive that I can trust to be reliable. But it does annoy me distinctly hearing its churning when doing intensive IO.

As for monitors, I'm somewhat worried by what I seem to perceive is a tendency to over-saturate the market with 16:9 screens and reduce the offerings in 16:10. I prefer the latter and can't stand the former. So it's either I'm misjudging what is happening, or I will eventually be forced to cave in and submit. I hope that day doesn't come.

120Hz, 3D-capable monitors, sadly, do not yet seem ready for prime time. The LG W2363D-PF and its competition all have significant flaws we hope to see corrected in future versions. Combined with their high price, they are not very attractive at the moment."

Would you mind elaborating on this? I've got a BenQ XL2410T and while there are features I don't like (the dynamic contrast is complete shite), it's an extremely competent gaming monitor in 2D or 3D. While the colour reproduction and viewing angles aren't exactly brilliant (better than my unibody MacBook but nowhere near as good as my BenQ FP241W that I use for work), they certainly aren't terrible (especially in sRGB mode), and the response time, high "refresh" rate and very decent brightness and contrast ratios made it worth the extra £100 or so.

Is the issue about general use over just gaming? I'm lucky in that I don't use my desktop for anything but gaming, and for that sole purpose, I'd say there are some decent 120Hz monitors out there.

Forgot to say: great article, as always. Thoroughly researched and (almost ) every component choice is really well justified.

Ars is so amazingly well-timed. I ordered one of the new thermaltake level 10 cases from amazon a while back, but it was on backorder. My plan was to wait until it got here to start shopping for componanats. Guess what? Got my shipping confirmation yesterday.

I look forward to assaulting many arsians with questions regarding parts over the coming weeks.

For dual proc systems, for ex., EVGA and ASUS have both made 6 or 7 full PCI-Ex16 MBs (seems at least 4 slots were full x16 quad GPU capable) using NVidia NS-200 chips. Seems the god box part missed this, or was there some other reason to use that MB?

Surprised to see Ars didn't go with the Corsair 600T for the Hot Rod. It's a bit more expensive, but well worth it. Sane cable management, room to install everything, easy to use hard drive bays, and 2x200mm fans. The cable management alone justifies this case for enthusiasts that will be in and out of the case during builds and upgrades.

While I think this is a very good guide, I would like to suggest that you make a Intel and a AMD guide. As a user who prefers AMD, I would really like to see the Hot Rod and God box that was built around a AMD processor as well. By making a guide that covers both you address the interests for both Intel users and AMD users.

I'm running a 1090T myself, and very happy with it for what I paid. But there's a very good reason you don't see AMD in anything other than budget systems right now- they have nothing comparable to Intel's top-shelf stuff. Not even close.

Its not about the performance comparison to me. And the same goes for a lot of AMD users. Frankly I support AMD for two major reasons. They perform very well in any situation I've used them, they offer reasonable prices for their hardware, and to be frank, we need other options out there besides Intel.

With that in mind, it would be nice to see them build out and offer thoughts, comments and advice for the best options for AMD based systems on all three levels. I'm sure Intel users would agree that they wouldn't mind seeing reviews on 'Budget' Intel systems as well. It benefits both sides by having a guide made specifically for each brand.

Units larger than the 1500VA typically edge rather close to the limits of a typical household power circuit, and not everyone will be keen on pulling new circuits just to power their God Box and an oversized UPS.

How typical? Spec is 2990VA from any single outlet in any British property. The ring mains are specced to 30A each (this is usually per-room), outlets specced to 13A and the RMS is 230V.

It's the kind of budget that an enthusiust without a completely free amount of money flying around can stick to in order to have a fully-working system that includes brand-new monitors, speakers, et cetera. Honestly, if you're not willing to spend that much money, you're better off getting a pre-built box from one of the major manufacturers. They get discounts on volume orders of parts, so they can offer the same piece of gear that you'd be able to build below the $700 for cheaper than you could do it yourself. Past a certain price-point, building your own PC just isn't economical.

Rather than sound like a whiny teenager going "you didn't account for my specific situation and budget so you failed", maybe you should realize that this is a site that started for enthusiusts, and while all are welcome, the content is still going to skew towards those who actually enjoy building their own rig and doing a bit of tinkering. Not everyone here is a hobbyist, but I'd say that they are a good portion of the population (and probably the vast majority of the paid subscribers). On a tech site, the content will skew towards the technically inclined. Yes, I realize that not everyone has $750 to spend on a computer...but at that point, you really shouldn't be spending it on building your own. You can get a decent box (with a warranty) from a major manufacturer that will cost less and perform almost identically for anything below that price range.

Ars didn't fail, they simply didn't account for your particular situation of not having the budget to build your own rig, but wanting to anyways. Sorry, that's really not their fault for covering the specific cases of every person on the planet. Me, I want something between Hot Rod and God Mode...why didn't they specifically include that for me? Oh right, because sometimes you have to figure out stuff for yourself.